Category Archives: OH HELL NO

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Hey Cosmo, Over here! Did you forget about me and my Minnesota Wild teammates?

Dearest Cosmo:

STOP NOW. JUST STOP. First of all, we started these hot guys in sports lists way before you did. Also, we’re actual female sports fans, so we, you know, watch games, monitor players and, for the most part, know who to watch for in a game.

I’m not saying that this new list of “NHL Playoff Hotties” is completely bogus, but you clearly don’t know what you’re doing. Granted, you did manage to include some obvious hotties, i.e. Henrik Lundqvist and Kris Letang, who you somehow forgot to include in your original list that we also called you out on.

Christien Sage of Oklahoma State. One pick Cosmo got right. He kinda reminds me of Austin Nichols in this picture.

As a lazy lady lately (whoa, alliteration!), I’ve been a total slacker about scouting new hotties to show you dedicated readers. I’ve been very anti-sports watching lately (aside from my favorite teams), so I’m completely unaware of fresh meat. With the NCAA Tournament upon us, there is plenty of fresh meat awaiting our ogling eyes. There is always that hot college boy that makes you feel like a pervy old lady.

With that said, Cosmo has been busy covering the sports world again, compiling a list of NCAA hotties to watch. I’ll let you be the judge, but here’s my 2 cents.

I have not really been keeping up with the Word Baseball Classic particularly well. The early games of course were over in Asia at odd times (although I have been aware of the hard luck Chinese Taipei team, since a friend who was raised in Taipei has been obsessing on Facebook). But here it is Friday night, there are finally games on in a manageable time zone, and two of those games feature Puerto Rico (featuring Cardinals Yady Molina and Carlos Beltran) and the United States (I am kind of a homer).

And then I tried to hit that little TV icon to “watch live.”

Some background: I am an MLB.TV premium subscriber, I pay to access regular season baseball on my Roku, laptop, and smarphone. But I don’t have cable.

To add insult to injury, once I made it past the cable screen (I have a sympathetic cable-subscribing boyfriend), I got this:

Yeah, see all that stuff about the Apple devices you are authorizing? See anything there about Android devices? Guess what type of smartphone I have? (Also, as near as I can figure, this screen pops up every time you pull up a game. They are not only forcing you to set up an MLB.com account, they’re refusing to remember your log in.)

Okay, look. I’ve devoted a lot of time and energy into hating the ever-loving hell out of Brett Favre for the monumental screw-job he handed Green Bay fans by first doing the ‘I MAY RETIRE OR I MAY NOT WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW’ dance and then the ‘LOLOLOLOL I AM SIGNING WITH YOUR RIVAL’ swan song. I really, really thought there couldn’t possibly be a bigger dick in organized sports than Brett Favre. I mean, the man singlehandedly held up football in Green Bay for a solid three years, and I’m pretty sure Aaron Rodgers still has Favre voodoo dolls in every room of his house.

That said? I’ve never seen an athlete so tone-deaf as to think that a nationally televised hour-long special to announce his free-agency decision smacked of anything beyond rampant egotism. That was horrifying in and of itself.

But a nationally televised hour-long special to break up with his hometown team in the most public manner possible? That’s an unprecedented level of douchebag.

Congratulations, LeBron James. You’re 2010’s entry into the Dick Move Hall of Fame. Good thing I don’t care about basketball.

I had a Twitter conversation with a few people last night over the use of “Lady” before a team mascot name to denote women’s sports versus men’s sports at the high school and college levels.

One person made the argument that by having the “Lady” qualifier, women’s sports are being separated and there’s an implication that they aren’t on the same level as men’s.

The other person felt that getting upset over the use of “Lady” was taking political correctness too far. They said they’d never even thought about the topic until someone else brought it up and felt that there was no underlying problem with differentiating between the two.

A quick internet search didn’t pull up any history in terms of the first use of “Lady,” but I hypothesized last night that the origin may have come from newspapers needing a way to distinguish between the teams when covering the sports.

It also likely had its origin in the early part of the 20th century, when being called a “Lady” would have been flattering and possibly used as a way to feminize sports and the athletes who played them.

One of the things I most hate about the use of the “Lady” qualifier is when it creates incongruous names. Here in Milwaukee there’s a Catholic high school who’s nickname is the Popes, meaning the girls teams are known as the Lady Popes.

There are a few cases where the “Lady” moniker has gone beyond use in recaps and has become an accepted part of the team’s name. The Tennessee women’s basketball team is known as the Lady Vols.

As someone who’s had to write recaps of four games at one school in one night, I appreciate the ability to have the “Lady” qualifier at my disposal to be able to help differentiate the articles and make sure the reader knew which sport was being discussed

I also admit to being annoyed when I go to my favorite college’s website and read a headline and am not sure which team is being discussed, so in that way I would appreciate the use of “Lady.”

But those are both opinions tempered by my background in journalism. I can see the need to have a way to distinguish between the men’s and women’s sides for clarity and that tends to outweigh my feminist instinct on the matter.

I find myself not particularly bothered by the use of “Lady,” but I feel like I should be more annoyed. Normally any sort of distinction that separates women from men would get my hackles up, so I’m not sure why I’m so unmoved by this issue.

What do you all think? Acceptable usage or inappropriate separation tactic? Does the very mention of a “Lady” team make your blood boil and you start yelling “Oh hell no!” or are you as ambivalent as I am?

So on my commute home, I decided to play around on Twitter, where I stumbled across this gem. How to Get Your Girlfriend Into Sports.

Now, leaving aside that the obvious answer to this time-honored problem of being a sports nut partnered with someone who doesn’t enjoy the old athletic display is to just date someone who likes sports. God, men (and women) of the world, if sports are important enough that you have to condition your partner into liking them, FIND SOMEONE WHO ALREADY LIKES SPORTS. Your partner is not a puppy. Don’t train them like one. God.